Narrow
slivers of light bounced off the wing of the plane and seeped
through the cracks of the shade, gently awakening me.
Rubbing my eyes, I turned to look outside. Morning's first
golden rays had transformed the indistinct, gray mass beneath me
into a rich, burnt red. It looked like a clay pot just
after it’s been removed from the kiln. I had never
seen earth quite like it--it was parched and scorched, but it had
life in it yet. I sensed there were many stories it could
tell me, if only I could learn to listen.

But
listening never was my strong suit; Sandra always told me that.
Sandra was my ex-girlfriend. It was my break-up with her
that brought about this trip. I slid the blind up and
dazzling sunshine streamed in. The last solid ground I
remembered seeing was the perfectly manicured and watered grass
of a baseball diamond. That was an entire ocean away now.
I squinted to make out the ground below, there were no baseball
fields down there; that was for sure. The guy beside me was
just coming to also. He stretched, peered out the window
and said something to me in Swedish. I nodded and gazed
back out the window.

There’s
nothing daring or romantic about entering a country by plane
unless your name is Lindbergh. Or the Beatles. With a
brand new millennium having begun, 21st century humankind lives
in the ever-growing shadow of our past. Except for the very
depths of the sea, the entire planet has been picked over and
scoured. Most of the sensational arrivals that could be
made have been. The comings and goings of modern man are
like a shadow passing over a bridge.

*

For some
reason, I kept thinking of Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan was the
Portuguese explorer commissioned by King Charles V to find a new
route to the rich trading ports of the Indies. Though he
succeeded in circumnavigating the globe, he never made it back to
Spain. He was killed in the Philippines leading a band of
sixty sailors into battle against two thousand native warriors.
Juan Sebastian del Cano, who had earlier spearheaded a failed
mutiny attempt in hopes of aborting the expedition before they’d
even made it halfway, was the only one of Magellan’s
captains to survive the journey. He led the half-starved
crew of his ship, the Victoria, triumphantly into port at
Seville. Only the Victoria, out of the five ships that set
to, returned. Of the two hundred and sixty-five seamen who
began the voyage, eighteen survived. With Magellan not
around to reveal him for the irresolute mutineer he was, Del Cano
and his crew received a hero’s welcome.

In Madrid,
I took a room in a hostel on a narrow alley off of the Puerta Del
Sol. Directly across the street was a run-down coin
laundry. Next-door was a fruiteria whose produce was mostly
over-ripe. On the front wall of the hostel was a bronze
plaque that announced to the handful of people who found their
way down the alley that this was the abode where the famous
author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra spent the last years of his
life. Someone once told me that Cervantes was the
Shakespeare of Spain. The two great writers actually passed
away within a month of each other. Shakespeare wouldn’t
have been caught dead in this dump.

*

Spain
was the most powerful country on Earth for nearly a century.
Her armada of battleships was considered invincible. During
that period, Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand V funded the
Italian navigator Christopher Columbus in his quest for the new
world. Columbus succeeded beyond anyone's wildest
imaginings. The man after whom cities and countries were
named, and for whom statues and monuments without number have
been erected, was later jailed on a trumped-up charge that
amounted to mismanagement.

In El
Parque de Buen Retiro, I met a girl with deep brown eyes and
full, sensuous lips that reminded me of Sandra. She invited
me to the bullfights, but I declined. It didn't sound like
such a fair fight.

After a
month in Madrid, I decided to head south. During the bus
ride to Granada, one of our tires blew We pulled to the
side of an open stretch of highway. It was blazing hot.
I sat on the dusty ground against a chain link fence and let the
sun beat down on my face. It felt good.

The
driver--a flabby, middle-aged man--was unperturbed by the turn of
events. He opened a compartment on the side of the bus and
pulled out a spare tire, some tools, and a canvas bag. In
front of everyone--young, old, women, and children--he stripped
down to his gray, blotchy boxer shorts. He removed a pair
of khaki, oil-stained coveralls from the bag and stepped into
them. Then he systematically went to work on the tire.

After about
five minutes, a heavy-set, elderly woman in a brown smock and
black shawl came over and asked me in Spanish to help the
driver. I pretended I didn't understand.

Isabella
and Ferdinand were interred in Granada. It was a political
decision. She was from Castile and he hailed from Aragon.
Their marriage merged the two kingdoms and enabled them to drive
the Moors from Granada, not to mention the Jews and pretty much
everyone else who didn’t share their Theo-sociological
beliefs. When they died, their home states wanted each of
them buried in their native soil. They had wed to unite the
country; their deaths nearly tore it apart.

In the
cathedral at Granada I caught a street urchin trying to pick my
pocket. He was tall and skinny with a long, hooked nose.
His dark features made me think he was one of the gypsies that
lived in the caves across from the Alhambra. Feeling a
slight tug at my hip pocket, I slapped his hand away and spun
around to face him.

I thought
about bashing his skull in against Isabella's sarcophagus.
Instead, I pulled a one thousand peseta note from my wallet and
handed it to him. He accepted it in perplexed silence.
Behind him was an el Greco version of La Pieta. In
it, the Virgin Mary was crying.

At my
pension in Granada I met an Australian girl who was backpacking
her way across Europe. She wore a deep sorrow just beneath
her smile, the way Sandra had toward the end. I’d
crossed an ocean to get away from her, but everywhere I looked,
she was there. The Australian girl, who couldn’t have
been more than twenty, had spent the winter cleaning rooms at a
ski resort in Switzerland. There she’d fallen deeply
in love with a boy from Prague who also worked at the hotel as a
bellhop. She told me she had to return to Australia in a
few weeks and she was worried she might never see her young man
again. I had no response. I told her that I’d
heard that the southern half of Spain would be completely desert
within fifty years.

When I
returned to Madrid, I fell ill. I curled up in a fetal
position on my narrow, single bed. My head throbbed and
waves of nausea rolled over me. After three days without
eating, I gathered my strength and headed downstairs. I
asked the senora--a stout, graying woman who was by turns
impatient and irritable, and then sweet and motherly--where I
could find a doctor. She knew I had a lot of things and
that they were all in my room upstairs, so she must have been
afraid I might die before settling my bill because she asked me
to pay the balance before leaving. Then she directed me to
the nearest hospital.

At the
hospital, a chubby, effete man who worked the reception desk
explained that they couldn’t treat me until I had handed
over thirty-five thousand pesetas in cash. I didn't have
that kind of money. I wondered if I were to drop dead right
then and there, would they have left my body in the lobby to rot
or would they at least drag me around back and throw me into a
dumpster?

I staggered
outside and caught a cab back to my hostel.

The fourth
day, I was lying naked on top of rumpled, sweat-soaked sheets.
Half delirious from fever and lack of food, I was convinced I
could see Cervantes' long, lean body seated at the small writing
table against the opposite wall. His narrow back, the back
that had been whipped as a galley slave in his youth, was hunched
forward and his crippled and withered left arm had been placed
delicately atop the table. He was writing something.
A new wave of nausea gripped me and my head began to throb as I
propped myself up on my elbows for a better look. Turning
to me, a wan smile spread across his gaunt, deeply lined face.
Though the smile was sad, infinitely sad, it lacked all
bitterness or contempt. I blinked to make sure I wasn't
hallucinating and he was gone.

The fifth
day, I still hadn't eaten and the fever continued to rage.
The prospect of dying in a tiny room, thousands of miles from
home became alarmingly real. By that time, it wasn't even
the idea of dying that bothered me. What I found I couldn't
understand was why it had to take so long.

The next
day, the fever broke.

I decided
right then to write it all down--every detail. That way I
wouldn't forget anything, like the way I’d already begun to
forget Sandra. The smell of her perfume, the taste of her
lips, the feel of her skin; it had all slipped away from me, bit
by bit, in less than one year. This time I wanted to save
it, all of it, the bad and the good. I tried. But
when I put the pen to paper, all that would come out was:
"Red earth, Golden sky.."

Stephen
Graf
is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he currently
resides, teaching English literature at Robert Morris
University. He spent a year in Madrid, Spain (the setting
for his current story) working for the public relations firm
SEIS. He holds Masters Degrees from Duquesne
University and Trinity College, Dublin, and a Ph.D. in British
Literature from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in
England. He has had short fiction published in
literary journals and magazines such as Cicada,
AIM
Magazine,
The
Southern Review,
Mobius,
Fiction,
The
Chrysalis Reader,
as well as The
Black Mountain Review
in Ireland. He has been published online in the New
Works Review
and the Dana
Literary Society Online Journal.
He was awarded an honorable mention in the Byline
Flash Fiction contest and was a finalist in the Glimmer
Train
Fiction Open. Most recently, his short story “Hadamard’s
Billiards” won the editor’s choice award in the
Spring, 2010 issue of The
Minnetonka Review
and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.